Disreputable Bodies: Explorations into Renaissance Natural Philosophy

This book examines the contested position of the body in Renaissance philosophy, thereby encompassing rarely studied material in close readings: it shows in which ways abstract metaphysical ideas evolved in tandem with the creation of new metaphors that shaped the understanding of Early Modern political, cultural and scientific practises. In that context, Disreputable Bodies describes how visual imagery and gendered discourses played a formative role in shaping novel approaches to the natural world. The Study considers the impact of Neo-Platonism on Renaissance natural philosophy, magic and metaphysics; it approaches the topic of the function and perception of gendered bodies by looking at the body discourses within the framework of the still largely unexplored ideas of some highly influential philosophers of the period: Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leone Ebreo, Alessandro Piccolomini, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Bernardino Telesio, Giambattista della Porta, and Giordano Bruno. Disreputable Bodies provides a novel approach to these issues and puts the thinkers into a new perspective by describing the function and interaction of innovative contemporary technologies (such as optics and distillation; see ch. 2 and 5), popular creeds (such as witchcraft and folk medicine, Epilogue) and their relationships to a wide array of recently rediscovered texts from the Greek and Roman periods that captured the attention of Renaissance intellectuals between 1460 and 1600. They contributed in unexpected ways to the formation of new cultural practices, such as surgical intervention into the human body aiming at moral improvement of the individual or medical vampirism (ch. 3 and 8): practices that entailed largely unexplored conceptualisations of physical bodies, but which were, as I show, tied inextricably to the formation of new and striking metaphors for the physical world. These figurative modes of speech were employed to describe the precarious role and paradoxical nature of bodies, for their metaphysical status wavered between God`s first Creation and the scum of the universe, between resistant, bulky matter and indeterminate volatile entities, moving freely between the lowest and the highest realms of the universe. Conspicuously, the images that philosophers used in their attempts to explain the world of natural change took the lead and developed a historical life of their own, thus in their turn shaping ideas about natural bodies, and, in tandem with it, souls. This bodily imagery gravitated towards representations of more or less explicit sexual relationships in the Early Modern period: prostitutes (ch.1 ), Vampires (ch.3), men cleft in halves (ch. 7), panderers, and cosmetic surgeons (ch. 8). My study describes in eight different case studies how these striking metaphors for the elusive physical world of change resulted in new perceptions of nature. This book combines therefore a topic in the history of ideas with an analysis of how gendered metaphors were employed to describe the physical aspect of the world. During the Early Modern period, such ideas formed in elliptical or self-referential ways. Philosophers were projecting gendered differences onto a universal cosmological screen, from which these distinctions were re-inscribed into relationships between men and women on earth, thus legitimising the supremacy of the former over the latter (ch. 4 and 6). The female body as figure of male speech became a battleground not only in terms of the social regulations pertaining to the lives of actual women, but also in the purportedly abstract realm of metaphysics. In that process, the often severe criticism of various tenets of Aristotle`s doctrines voiced by different Renaissance philosophers proved an important factor for change: in particular, the many texts of the Platonic tradition contributed to the erosion of essential tenets of established natural philosophy. Novel ideas, such as the possibility of manipulating the physical world through a sort of natural, learned magic significantly altered popular perceptions of bodies.